Signs in public spaces and landscape installations
The work in the open began in 1985, when the detached world of art galleries, museums and so-called art experts and officials began to increasingly irritate and bore me at the same time.
In a world where over 87% of the population is illiterate, the art market is primarily concerned with branding and visitor numbers. Art is degenerating into a mere commodity. The original idea of giving people new ways of seeing the world is lost in a playground where marketing and vanity go hand in hand.
At the same time, as a painter, it did not seem entirely honest to me that the nail - on which the picture hangs like a ham on the wall - was not also addressed in the painting...
That's why I constructed images that could exist independently of the architecture on poles - then I realized that this object already existed.
It is called "shield".
In the following 40 years, around 35 outdoor works were created on three continents in public spaces and also in spaces unrelated to art but not culture.
The works were often created on my bicycle trips – for example in 1988 on my trip from Pakistan to China.
Visitors to the exhibition included truck drivers, football fans, soldiers, young Taliban in Pakistan and other passers-by...
As a scholarship holder in 1986 in the class of the architect Otto Steidle, I learned that you always have to analyze the environment before you start designing outside. After preliminary sketches that related to the respective environment, I painted the motifs of the signs on aluminum sheets on site and then positioned them on thin aluminum tubes in the respective context. I always had these painting materials with me on my racing bike, which was always packed slimly, and often also a 35mm camera and an old Agfa medium format camera in the saddlebag.
From the existing elements of the environment, rows of signs are created in the environment, the characteristics of which are also the contents of these signs.
You could see it as a kind of self-aware landscape painting that becomes part of the landscape. Neo-Romanticism goes very far out...
I was familiar with the desert from several bike tours in Tunisia, Algeria and the Taklamakan. In my work “Desert Animals”, the content of the panels can also describe the conditions of one’s own perception.
My installations often arise spontaneously, en passant on site.
For example, the installation "In Honor of Allah" with a missing square in one of the sign surfaces was installed in one of the largest mosques in the world, the Grand Mosque in Lahore, at 4:30 a.m. shortly after sunrise with the permission of the Imam. Only when I told him that the work was created in honor of Allah did he give me permission to install it.
All this happened just days after the US accidentally shot down an Iranian pilgrimage plane over the Persian Gulf, and the mood was extremely heated and irritable...
Breslau Galerie Avant-garde BWA, 1994 "Transformers"
The work, developed at the invitation of the local museum Galerie Avantgarda, runs 100 m across a central square in the former Silesian capital.
The enlarged drawings shown on 10 plates, of current
Passers-by and former German residents show hand sketches of citizens of the city, including my mother.
In the conception of the work, a circle was drawn around the center of the city like the face of a clock. At positions 12 to 6 o'clock I took a photo of the city and asked the passers-by for a map of the route. For positions 6 to 12 I had drawings made by former residents of the city.
The drawings - some of which are based on 50 years of memory - show directions to the Hatzfeld Palace in both German and Polish, and run as a row of signs across the public square in front of the palace in my installation.
The back of the signs shows a photo work with things from the city of Wroclaw, including the ubiquitous trash can known as the Transformer. It transforms old love letters, lottery tickets and newspapers into an old raw material for our new age of communication.
This palace was the command center of the Waffen-SS during the six-month Russian siege of the city in World War II. My public question: "How do I get to the cultural association?" sparked a highly controversial discussion in Poland about historical manipulation and German revanchism. In a television interview about the installation at the time, I pointed out the new possibilities of a Central European metropolis within the EU.
This discussion also gave rise to a new self-image in Poland - including its German aspects. In this central European, formerly German and now Polish province of Silesia, the philosophy of transformation was developed around 1700. There are now some bilingual place names in Polish and German, Wroclaw became the European Capital of Culture and the Transformer made it into the culture section of the SZ magazine after my exhibition there.
Years later, I was invited by the journalist Sabine Magerl to present a video of my sign work at the documenta. However, as I had to earn money for my family in print management at the time, I unfortunately didn't have time at short notice to present my work...